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She Smells Me, She Smells Me Not

CLEOPATRA welcomed Mark Antony in a room knee-deep with rose petals.
Shakespeare wrote about the Eglantine rose with apple-scented leaves. Victorian
women sniffed their violets and nosegays to mask the odors of the street.

Scent may be the most heady garden element of all, but many of our best-loved
flowers have lost their fragrance over the last half-century as hybridizers
pursued traits like brighter colors, bigger flowers, compact growth or long
stems for cutting. Take a whiff of some hybrid red roses, for example, and
you'll smell - well, almost nothing: an olfactory blank.

"In cut flower breeding today, the concentration is still on shipability and
vase life, and these new flowers have all the romance of an artichoke," said Tom
Carruth, research director of Weeks Roses, a wholesale grower based in Upland,
Calif.

But as the gardening community grows more sophisticated, and therefore more
appreciative of the sensual and the subtle, smell - the final frontier of the
senses - is returning to garden fashion.

More nursery catalogs have begun to include lists of fragrant plants on equal
footing with categories like hardy vines and ground covers, and breeders are
starting to take notice.

In the fall Weeks Roses will introduce a rose named after Julia Child (it has
a licorice candy smell) and a purple and lavender rose called Wild Blue Yonder,
which has a strong spicy fragrance. Mrs. Child, who died in August, picked her
namesake from a sampling of new hybrids.

In addition, the company says old-fashioned varieties that never lost their
scent, like Sombreuil, a white climber from the late 19th century, are enjoying
a resurgence.

"People go for the color first," Mr. Carruth said by way of explanation.
"Then 99.44 percent of the time, it's to the nose."

I'm surprised by how many fragrant flowers are still not promoted, and by how
many old or overlooked varieties have yet to make a well-deserved comeback,
including native azaleas, bearded iris, clethra and the old-fashioned mock
orange.

Fragrance seems to be what gardeners want to talk about this season. On
Saturday the Parrish Art Museum, in Southampton, N.Y., will convene a two-day
event on scent and the garden, with talks by Stephen Lacey, a British garden
columnist and author of "Scent in Your Garden" (Frances Lincoln, 1991), and
Robin Clery, a so-called perfume hunter, who captures botanical fragrances for
perfume and other products on tropical expeditions.

"Out here the mentality is, if it's bigger, it's better," said Perry Guillot,
a landscape architect based in Southampton who helped stage the event.
"Fragrance brings gardeners back to simple earthly delights. It's not just about
who can buy the biggest tree. Fragrance is so much subtler. It can be a freshly
mowed lawn or a honeysuckle that grew in from a neighbor's fence."

By most accounts, humans can detect only five flavors: sweet, sour, bitter,
salty and a fifth flavor, derived from the amino acid glutamate and known to the
Japanese as umami. But we can discern some 10,000 distinct smells. Without
smell, flavors would be barely detectable. Remember holding your nose when you
took medicine as a child?

Scents may be plentiful, but they are hard to analyze, and even harder to
describe. That may account for why smell is often an afterthought in plant
descriptions and garden plans.

Scent is invisible, but its placement is crucial. I wouldn't make a planting
themed on fragrance, for example, as I would for spring color or dwarf
evergreens. I prefer to sprinkle the smells like punctuation. The lily is an
exclamation point; the scent of Carolina sweetshrub floats on the evening air
like a question mark: "What's that smell?"

Unfortunately, it's not always easy to find those punctuation marks. After
World War II, scent was bred out of roses, for example, as hybridizers worked
toward new colors, long stems and durability. Since thick leathery petals do not
readily disintegrate, their molecules do not waft into the air. Instead, they
remain imbedded and undetectable until the blossom begins to rot.